Vendors spring into action at Hometown Craft Show - Standard Speaker

Shari MacNeill packed up her vibrant tie-dyed tapestries, essential oils and handmade jewelry last year when the pandemic shut down the venues she’d sell from.

But on Sunday, she and scores of other small business owners opened their pop-up canopies and unpacked their totes of merchandise at a crowded Hometown Craft Show, hoping to make up some of their losses.

Her MacNeill Market stand was graced with customers inside the Hometown Farmers Market on Mahanoy Avenue in Rush Twp. around 11:30 a.m.

“They’re really showing up and buying,” said MacNeill, of Jim Thorpe, behind tables filled with gifts.

It was a welcome change from last spring when many festivals and fairs in the commonwealth closed out of concern for the new coronavirus. As a result of those closings, MacNeill lost her main income.

“It was intense,” MacNeill said. The thousands she spent to rent space at those 2020 events was placed in limbo for when the shows resume, she said. To make up the loss she stocked shelves at a grocery store near her home from April until the fall of last year. The store was eager to hire so they could meet demand and she needed an income.

MacNeill missed the vendor shows, though. In fact, a lot of people did.

This year’s May craft show was “totally booked,” with close to 300 vendors, said Suzi Dunn-Biege of the Hometown Farmers Market. That and the crowd Sunday showed her people were ready to be back out again. The market’s walkways were filled with people peeking into vendor’s stands and its parking lots were full.

Dunn-Biege believes it was a combination of things that brought people back to the craft fair — partly inspired by the vaccine but also because it was time for people to make their own decisions on where they feel safe going.

Last year, nearly every show in the area canceled and while the May 2020 Hometown Craft Show was canceled, the fall show still went on.

While Kristen Myers sold crocheted goods and other craft gifts in the past, she used the pandemic downtime to create a new type of merchandise to sell. But, a lack of places to sell them led to inventory piling up at home, she said.

Displays of genuine and faux handmade leather jewelry were neatly arranged at her sales table. Myers also takes in income from the crafts she sells through her small business, Night Owl Creations. Craft sales help pay for her children’s cheering and football expenses.

Beth Werner is a social worker but her hobby involves hand-painted glass and machine embroidery, and it’s a hobby she was finally able to display in public after winter came to a close. She looked out into the crowd of people ambling on the markets walkways with hope.

Jessica Major of Wilkes-Barre was checking out a solid wood rolling pin handcrafted by Nate Ohlinger of Rockland, Berks County. She was waiting for her sister, an avid baker, to meet her and her son.

“I told my sister we need to go,” Major said when she saw the craft fair advertised last month. While Major enjoys the shows, she also felt sympathy for the vendors who couldn’t operate last year. “That’s their money. I believe we need to support them,” she said before heading to a parking area to show her sister the culinary find she made.

Ohlinger said he found plumbing work as festivals and shows closed around him. And, while it may be tough for people to find lumber at a good price right now, Ohlinger has his pick from his neighbor’s firewood pile. He said his neighbor burns the wood to create pottery. Ask him about coronavirus and the resulting shutdown, Ohlinger will tell you it was all political. But, he was also glad to be out with the public again.

For at least 20 years, Donna Mease of Lebanon has come to Hometown to sell her crafts.

“We had all this sitting at home,” she said as she peered down on her sales table. Last year she attended only three shows while typically she’ll have over a dozen. Sunday was her first major craft show since the pandemic started and, fully vaccinated, she looked forward to it.

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